Bill Bryson Quotes

I've always been an outsider. Even in London. If I returned to Scotland, I'd feel a complete foreigner.

The worst feeling in the world is the homesickness that comes over a man occasionally when he is at home.

I don't believe I could live in Iran again. A tree, once uprooted from the earth, is very difficult to plant again.

I'm tired and nervous and I'm in America. Here you don't know that you live.

I belong in America more than South Africa. I can't remember the feeling of living there anymore. It's like it was in another life. That's sad in a way. It is my country. It's where I grew up. You don't know what it's like to have these negative feelings about your homeland. There are roots you can't escape.

I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger.

I probably felt most out of place as a young kid growing up in Sri Lanka. My mental world was somewhere else, partly because of reading and daydreaming.

Going home to Australia, it's good to get home, but it's kind of bad too because you get used to that way of life again and you have to come back to America.

For me, leaving the Marine Corps was more disorienting than returning home.

How weird it was to drive streets I knew so well. What a different perspective.

You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.

I'd always somehow felt slightly as if I'd been born in the wrong country.

Whenever I leave Manhattan, I get the bends!

I felt like I'd been misplaced in the cosmos and I belonged in Maine.

My family lives there, so I come back sometimes between shows for a couple days. I get back a couple times a year. When I was 30 to 34 I was weirded out when I came back - you know, how your past gets away from you. It's grown so much.

I never really felt like I belonged in California.

I'm very attracted to exile literature - particularly Nabokov - exactly because the idea of being away from home for any serious length of time is so inconceivable to me.

I feel like I've never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet I don't know exactly where I fit in... There's always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself.

The Lakers had been home to me, unlike the home I had grown up and felt apart from.

What is newest to one in foreign countries is not always the people, but their surroundings, and those same little details of life and circumstance which make no impression on a man in his own land until he returns to it after a prolonged absence, and then they stand out very sharply for a while.

If you go back to your home town or you're reunited with school friends, its always slightly bittersweet because as much as there's nice things in terms of seeing them again, the town has changed without you, and you're no longer a part of it.

I didn't enjoy my college life in Noida much because I was quite disoriented there, since I was staying away from my family.

For someone who doesn't live there, when I go back to Scotland it's very weird for me.

Even when I wrap my work and come home or whatever it is I try to do, I can identify with that feeling of being a little outside, of struggling to get back into normality.

exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.